Chris Landreth’s Twisted Spine Will Melt Your Mind

After Chris Landreth nailed his engineering degree in 1986, he did what any cool brainiac interested in fluid mechanics would have done: He leaped head-first into computer-generated animation. More than two decades and one Academy Award later, his new short film The Spine is set to blow minds.

“I’m way more analytical in my animation because of my engineering background,” the 48-year-old told Wired.com in an e-mail interview. “I tend to be reductive, and separate things down to their basic components. This often leads to an ass-backwards way of animating, as other animators have told me, but it seems to work out fine.”

It works out wonderfully and weirdly. Landreth’s growing resume is a welcome experiment in what he calls psychorealism: The human psyche as rendered in animation. It’s a welcome change for those who think mainstream CGI could be exploring stranger, more challenging territory.

Like his Oscar-winning 2004 short Ryan (embedded below), The Spine (previewed above) employs bizarro CGI imagery to literalize human flaws and failures. This time around, Landreth’s meta-toon is much more twisted (although just as moving). Instead of documenting the drug abuse of influential Canadian animator Ryan Larkin, Landreth casts a wider net in The Spine, taking a wicked look at disturbed couples undergoing marriage counseling.

The result? A freakish array of human drama: A spineless husband melts into a puddle, his complaining wife swells larger with each insult, couples pick off pieces of each other’s skin with grouchy obsession. It’s a far cry from most CGI, where humans look, well, human. Instead, The Spine breaks down its characters’ humanity, displaying their interior dramas with nightmarish skill.

“What I’ve tried to get across is not that these are freaks, although their appearance is freakish,” Landreth said. “The characters have these appearances due to the stuff that shapes all of us. We are all damaged, fallible and messed up; we are all freaks. That’s why I’m attracted to this type of imagery: Not to alienate these characters from us as freaks, but hopefully to bring them closer, to give a means for us to identify with them.”

Chris Landreth's The Spine stretches the boundaries of CGI. Imagine what his forthcoming feature film will do to it.Image courtesy National Film Board of Canada

“I try to use imagery unique to CGI to enhance my storytelling,” Landreth said. “There is so much beyond realism — the literal meaning of surrealism — that people understand on an emotional and psychic level that which has yet to be discovered. My way is but one: Films like Pan’s Labyrinth and Waltz With Bashir use CGI in new, exciting and meaningful ways, and there is going to be a lot more of it.”

To bring his destabilizing imagery to life, Landreth seized upon Autodesk’s recently acquired imaging software Maya, as well as Side Effects Software’s animation package Houdini. Landreth is a pro at it, having spent his post-grad years testing the limits of animation software at Silicon Graphics’ Alias|Wavefront, the first home of Maya. Combined with his experience with engineering and fluid mechanics, working extensively with both software packages gave him the foundation needed to push CGI past the limits of Ryan.

“There have obviously been improvements to these commercially available pieces of software in the last five years,” he said. “In dynamics simulations, depictions of fluids, cloth, dirt, shattering glass and hair are way easier than back in 2004, when we did Ryan. In rendering, it’s possible now to suggest the look and feel of living human flesh, particularly skin, in a new way.”

Which is saying something, considering how far he stretched Larkin’s animated avatar in Ryan, a phantasmagoric film that literally took its subject apart and exposed his failed insides, blowing away Academy voters in the process. “That Oscar seems pretty far away now,” Landreth said. “Ryan was a suggestion about what is possible with this flavor of storytelling; The Spine is more a realization of it.”

That said, Landreth isn’t gunning for a second statuette just yet. He’s buried in the financing of his first feature, which Landreth is keeping tightly under wraps. The mind reels, pardon the pun, at what strange possibilities could emerge from it. If it’s anything like Ryan or The Spine, it could invite the greatest compliment the Academy can give, which is to say a snub.

“The best pieces of filmmaking in history never won Oscars,” Landreth said. “Think of Orson Welles or Alfred Hitchcock. But I can’t say too much more about the feature until the green light starts to shine, if only faintly.”